By: Magdalena Mihaylova
Writing our story in the acceleration age.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a planner. When I travel, the trips are outlined in detail: saved Google Maps locations organized by food, nightlife, and sightseeing. My planner is a blur of scratched-out, completed tasks, and separated, ever-growing categories: homework for class, edits for Generation Magazine, and my internship assignments. Even the weekends—a time reveled for its lazy, taskless quality—are appropriated by my planning-centered mind: if you’re a close friend of mine, you are sure to receive a text on Wednesday evening inquiring which day of the weekend to slot in a visit to a museum exposition or an afternoon coffee-park combo (even clubbing is subject to this mentality—I can’t hang out on a Sunday if I have plans to go out on Saturday night!).
You might be thinking: what an exhausting way to live (and no, I’m not a Virgo). Or, perhaps, this seems like nothing out of the ordinary—any scroll through a twenty-something’s TikTok feed will show videos of “plan with me”, “how I organize my week”, or a variety of other videos that celebrate the easiest way to feel like you have control under our accelerated, alienating neoliberal society (without actually having it, of course, and medicating or burning yourself/your wallet out in the never-ending process of trying to have it). Regardless, I would consider my case unique because despite being an obvious control-freak and Type A planner, I am also very subject to the will of my emotions or persuasions of my closest circle, which implies swift deviations from “the plan” based on a single comment or grievance of the heart (and again, no, I’m not a Cancer. Gemini moon, though!)
There’s a moment in Gilmore Girls where Loreali faces a similar predicament to the one I’m describing above, wherein she begins questioning if any of her tastes are actually hers, or if they are ones imposed on her by her mother (or in her case, in spite of her mother). In a similar way, any decision I make first subconsciously passes through the filter of what is expected of me? This could take form in a paternal way—what would my parents think of me if I did X?—in a romantic way—if I do Y, my partner will react like this…so maybe I shouldn’t do it—or even within friendships—because last week I did Z, she will get mad if I decide to do it again. The purity of a personal decision is lost within the haze of all of the expectations of some imaginary council that rules in my mind, presiding over everything from what to eat for lunch—this is the third time this week I’ve gotten takeout—to deciding to move cities—I’m 24, I can’t get stuck here.
These are self-imposed councils, of course. Neither my parents nor my best friends are lingering in the shadows with a notepad and pencil, scribbling down my errors and holding up scorecards in a way that evokes Olympic gymnastics competitions—and for that you receive a 6, you shouldn’t have texted him, you idiot! Instead, due to the society myself and most of those reading this piece grew up in, we are subject to a complete free-for-all in terms of painting the story of our lives. If we imagine life as a walk through a dense, foggy forest, we can picture the generation before us as having smooth, well-lit paths with indicators, leading the majority of its travelers down one of a few select trails: for women, it might mean getting married and having a family right out of college; for men, it might be to also get married but to provide financially for said family. In our current day scenario, it would be like when you go on a hike and you are walking through dense brush, looking left and right and seeing places where it seems someone has stepped, but you’re not quite sure if it’s actually a marked trail. Maybe you accidentally stumble backwards, get lost, or get mauled by a grizzly bear in the process. Or maybe you find your way to the path of those before us, which, although safe, is depressingly repressive.
I want to be clear: I’m not calling for women everywhere to reassume submissive roles just because it gives our life a precise, comfortable past. I would prefer the foggy ambiguity of our current-day forest to the dullness of not having a choice. But there is an anxiety borne out of not knowing what’s two steps before you, and that’s an anxiety unique to our generation, one that has undone many of the social institutions that dictated how one is to live their life. And perhaps it is precisely because of that anxiety, that uncertainty, that we desperately attempt to create some feeling of control, be it through extremely-detailed planning or cerebral, analytical articles like this very one that I’m writing.
And yet, at the same time that we clutch onto these feeble illusions of control, our generation is also known for its sensitivity (in the U.S., we were snowflakes, here in Spain, it’s “la generación de cristal”—the glass generation). As I mentioned that it tends to occur with me, I can plan all I want, but the second something brushes against my ego, the snowflakes start to fall. Then, just as I turn to the council of loved ones in my brain, my peers (and I, as well) turn to their social media accounts for the counsel of people they don’t know, but somehow feel connected to. Oddly enough, our generation doesn’t only blindly follow what a recognized figure says—think the typical if Taylor Swift says this is a good idea, I’ll do it—but we actually seem to more deeply trust the opinions of everyday people, whose qualifications to be giving advice are ambivalent. In other words, we rely on anonymous figures when sketching out the expectations we have for our lives. This is concerning on a political level—one need not reflect too much without seeing the obvious parallel in the radicalization of white men via social media—but it also poses an interesting question for sociologists everywhere: whereas before, major institutions like the church, the academic system, and the family conditioned the roles and function of a society, now it is the TikTok algorithm and MacKenzie from Connecticut (or whoever else said algorithm picks up—keep in mind that TikTok does not order videos by popularity of the account; anyone can show up on your for-you page) that subtly defines how you dress, act, and think.
If we ditch the forest metaphor and instead reach for a pencil, picturing our lives as a story that we are supposed to write out, nowadays there are so many people in the writer’s room that you can barely get a sentence of your own onto the page. The expectations of others that we auto-impose onto ourselves create an incoherent, confusing, and ultimately alienating plot that leads us back to the very place that we were trying to escape: feeling like we have no control over our own fates. Instead, we need to reclaim the pen and make space for our own writing, no matter that it might be littered with typos or long-winded monologues or imperfect characters. And that is not to say that you find yourself suddenly all alone in the writer’s room—everyone needs a good editor or two, be it from the well-intentioned advice of your parents or the supportive but firm stance of a best friend. Anyone who is a writer also knows that the editing process can be tense: maybe your girlfriends are telling you it’s time to block your ex, but you’re really stuck on that line—you can’t see how you could edit it without changing the whole meaning of that part of the story. Maybe it becomes a mess of scribbles and deletions and re-additions. Maybe you scream at the editor a bit in the process, or end up writing a character all too clearly a fantasy compared to who he really was. But all of that chaos born out of the uncertainty and constant change and acceleration bodes for an entertaining tale. And the best part, if you can get to it? It’s yours, and only yours.
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